BBU’s EzineArticles Search API Widget Plugin for WordPress

What is BBU’s EzineArticles Search API Widget (ESAW)?

As simply as it sounds, BBU’s EzineArticles Search API Widget is a plugin that allows you to search EzineArticles.com repository of articles using the standard API calls (not scraping) and displays those results in WordPress widget.

EzineArticles lets you performs 100 requests per hour. This plugin is so efficient you only need no more than one request per hour, leaving you many remaining requests for other applications.

This plugin requires WordPress 2.7 or later. Support for previous version is not available as it requires additional third-party module. Please upgrade your WordPress version if you’d like to use this plugin. Sooner or later, you should do it anyway.

What Does BBU’s EzineArticles Search API Widget Solve?

EzineArticles is the biggest article directory. No matter in which niche you are in, chances are you can make use of the site to drive traffic and generate prospects for your business.

Article marketers who have published their articles to the directory often like to showcase the list of their recent work in the sidebar for others to read.

This is never before possible unless you scrape the site. Without a doubt, this approach involved dirty code, but no more. With EzineArticles API, finally the site opens its data for anyone — registered API users — to use.

With this plugin, you’ll be able to customize EzineArticles search query and get updated list of results on the sidebar. Once setup, you don’t have to touch it anymore. It automatically runs and updates the data itself.

How to Use This Plugin

Once installed — see the instructions above — you can go to Settings → EZA Search API to customize the search query.

Here are options that you can customize:

EzineArticles API Key. This is a sequence of characters given by EzineArticles upon registration. You must use this to access EzineArticles API.

What to Search. You can search for recent articles, most viewed articles, most recent articles list, most published articles, and most emailed articles. By default, you search the latest articles.

Author. Enter the full name of the author you want to search for. This lets you to narrow down your search to your articles or any author’s articles.

No. of Articles to Display. Enter the number of articles you want to display on the sidebar. By default, it is 5 but you can customize as you want.

Category / Sub-Category. Pick from the drop down list the category or sub-category you want to search. If you leave it unselected, this means search the whole EzineArticles web site.

From those options above, the only required fields are EzineArticles API Key and No. of Articles to Display.

EzineArticles also updates their category listings regularly. If you need to get an updated list in the Category / Sub-Category drop down menu, you need to press the Update EZA Categories once.

As the list is not updated on a daily basis, you don’t need to hit the button often.